Transcribed & reposted [some text in colored quotes, links, & new images added],: February 21, 2024
From the archives: This wonderfully written article written almost 30 years ago by Pat Wechsler, for New York Magazine, when they were still ‘true journalists’, and before the magazine became ‘Anti K’.
It shows that Bobby Kennedy’s ‘morals, commitment, and efforts to doing what is right and just,’ still holds true today. He is still in the trenches, working hard for the people and the environment.
Wechsler, P. (1995, nov 27). The Kennedy Who Matters. New YorkMagazine. Reprint.
Robert Francis Kennedy, 41, believes in truth, and good and evil, and right and wrong. The importance of truth, he says, is the largest lesson that his late father ever taught him. “My father’s vision of the world was very much colored by his Catholic upbringing. To him it was an apocalyptic battle between right and wrong,” says Kennedy speaking from behind a desk in his cluttered, utilitarian office a Pace University in White Plains, where he teaches environmental law. Kennedy looks rather predictably, echt-Kennedy: rumpled and post-preppy and very much like his father, whose picture hangs near the door. “Every night at the dinner table we would have a family discussion, and we had to choose up sides” he says. “We had to participate. I look at my life in the way now, that it is important to participate, that it is important to take the side of right. It is partly out of sense of duty, but never out of sense of drudgery. I find it all very exciting.”
“I look at my life in the way now, that it is important to participate, that it is important to take the side of right. It is partly out of sense of duty, but never out of sense of drudgery. I find it all very exciting“.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr
Bobby was only 14 when his father, a New York’s senator and the leading Democratic presidential candidate, was murdered, but he appears to have no problem evoking his father’s stance of righteous clarity. And now his generation is growing its own mini-dynasty – older sister Kathleen was elected lieutenant governor of Maryland last year, and older brother Joseph II is a five termer in Uncle Jack’s old congressional seat. “It has always been a very interesting life,” Bobby says. “There are certain things which I wish I didn’t have to live through, but for the people, for the ability to meaningfully participate, I have loved being a Kennedy.”
Despite his name, Bobby has managed – at least in recent years – to avoid much of the gossipy attention that has dogged other Kennedys, particularly cousin John. He’s far from press-averse. But compared with say, George magazine, watershed protection is hardly the stuff to get you guest appearances on Murphy Brown. For his twelve year environmental advocacy career, Kennedy has represented two New York based environmental organizations – the Hudson Riverkeeper, a Putnam County-based coalition of fisherman and other people who want to clean up and protect the river, and the Natural Resource Defense Council, a national lobbying and litigation group headquartered in Chelsea. On behalf of these groups, he and several other environmentalists traveled to Albany this past spring to lobby city, state, upstate, and federal officials who were meeting privately about the future of the reservoir system. At the time, the federal Environmental Protection Agency was threatening to force New York to build the filtration plant unless the state and city put together a permanent program to protect the city water supply from pollution. At $9 billion, such a plant would have been a huge financial blow for the city, costing each household several thousand dollars. Protecting the watershed, on the other hand, could have severely limited real estate development and thus job growth in the surrounding communities of Delaware, Sullivan, Putnam, Greene, Ulster, and Westchester counties.
Kennedy wanted to make sure that environmentalists had a part in shaping this deal. “I also knew I wanted to work with them at some point,” says Pataki’s counsel Finnegan, but I felt the time wasn’t ripe – their perspective would be too radical.”
Indeed, government participants at the private meeting – particularly those from upstate towns who had tussled with Kennedy before – threatened to walk out if he and other environmentalists were allowed in. On the flip side, however, Kennedy, among others, had vowed to file a raft of lawsuits if the negotiations were headed in the wrong direction. “The governor was cautious too,“ Finnegan says. “He wanted to wait and see how they reacted after these first meetings. If it showed up in the press, then we knew there would be problems.”
There was no press, and Pataki moved to bring the environmentalists into the negotiations in the late spring. “Bobby made it clear to me that there would be some minimum requirements necessary before he could endorse any agreement coming out of the meetings,” Finnegan says. “He was never unreasonable; in fact, he showed real gut instinct for what was doable.”
“He was never unreasonable; in fact, he showed real gut instinct for what was doable.” – Finnegan, counsel for New York Governor, George Pataki
Kennedy’s minimums included a rigorous scientific monitoring program and creation of a council to meet regularly on the condition of the watershed. Kennedy also insisted that citizens be able to sue private interests and governmental agencies for running afoul of the agreement – an effective legal technique that he had employed for the Riverkeeper and the NRDC. The meetings went on and on – Kennedy says he personally attended most of the 250 sessions – and never entirely lost the contentious tone with which they had begun. But Finnegan remembers the watershed moment, as it were, when he believes Kennedy helped cinch the deal.
At this meeting, in September, the debate centered on arcane questions of how the data from the monitoring program would be used. “The upstaters thought that if the monitoring showed that more development was possible, regulations should be changed to allow it,” Finnegan says. “Many of the environmentalists thought only more regulation and not less should be considered. But Bobby said that if the data tell us that the regulations should be changed for more growth, then so be it. I remember he said, ‘We’re not anti-growth; we’re for a clean environment.’ The upstaters never looked at him the same after that.”
Anthony Bucca, vice chairman of the Board of Supervisors in the Catskills town of Hunter, remembers how he used to refer to Kennedy as a Fifth Avenue environmentalist, even though he had to admit he kind of liked him. “I regret that phrase now,” Bucca says. “He’s not the rich dilettante I made him out to be with that. We all got kind of caught up in our own hyperbole.”
The environmentalists apparently did too. Bucca recalls hearing Kennedy tell Lynn Samuels on her WARC talk show that raw sewage was being dumped into the reservoirs. “There was not raw sewage being dumped,” Bucca says. “The city would have been all over us like a pit bull on a poodle. The only time that ever happened was when the city owned plants up here malfunctioned.”
[JRG- So clearly it did happen, & Kennedy’s statement holds true. See EPA. (1992), and was regular practice in the early days prior to 1992. See Soll, D. (2013). Empire of Water.]
But Bucca says that he and others upstate felt overwhelmed by the importance and complexity of the issues. “I’ve got to give Bobby credit – with all the crises facing the city, he helped to get money out of them for us.”
Kennedy didn’t really have to modify his position very much, negotiating with the Koch and Dinkins administrations. Bucca says, Kennedy always maintained that fair treatment of upstaters interests was crucial to any workable plan. But it took this month’s agreement to convince the non-Kennedy-loving non-liberals that he was capable of more than stunt politics. Which brings us to the inevitable Kennedy question: When is he going to run for office?
“But it took this month’s agreement to convince the non-Kennedy-loving non-liberals that he was capable of more than stunt politics“ – Pat Wechsler (article author)
One possible opening is the congressional seat for the lower Hudson Valley, now held by Republican and sometime environmental apostate Sue Kelly, a first termer. ”His environmental work puts him in a very good position for a race in that district, where Kelly has flip-flopped so many times on the issue since she was elected,” says Judith Hope, chair of the state Democratic Party. “I haven’t talked to him yet, about running, but I had a conversation about having a conversation with Bobby. And I plan to talk to him in the near future.”
Another possible opening is the senate seat once held by his father and now occupied by the terrifically shrewd and lucky Alfonse D’Amato. “Bobby’s got the name, he’s got the brains, he’s got the commitment,” Hope says, “so why not go for it?”
“Bobby’s got the name, he’s got the brains, he’s got the commitment” – Judith Hope (chair of the state Democratic Party)
Kennedy is mulling it over. “If I thought I could accomplish more in the political process, I would,” he says. “I love politics. I always have a relative running, and I work in every campaign.” He often likes to show a kind of ‘generic family campaign button’ developed last year when no fewer than five Kennedy’s were running:
VOTE FOR THE KENNEDY NEAREST YOU! 1994
Bobby has ‘always’ supported his family in their political endeavors.
(Kathleen – MD / Patrick – RI / Joe – Mass. / Mark – MD / Ted – Mass.)
His eldest brother believes he would take easily to politics “Bobby has always been a natural leader, a Pied Piper personality, collecting a whole assortment of different kinds of folks along the way,” says Joe, the Massachusetts congressman. “I have always thought he would make a marvelous politician, but he’s had very mixed feelings about it. It’s hard on our family; everyone has had their own Ideas. But it’s not like he had to turn to me to ask what’s it like. We all know that very well.”
“Bobby has always been a natural leader, a Pied Piper personality, collecting a whole assortment of different kinds of folks along the way. I have always thought he would make a marvelous politician” – Joe Kennedy, Massachusetts congressman (brother)
“I haven’t ruled it out,” Bobby says finally. “But right now, I have a new wife and young children. I don’t feel like I have to think about it for a couple of years.
Bobby, the third of eleven kids, spent his earliest years between the family home – Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia – and summers and vacations with the entire clan at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port. Among the 29 cousins, young Bobby was considered the nature boy. As a child, he remembers having dogs, homing pigeons, and even an abandoned sea lion that lived for a while in one of the pools at Hickory Hill. His passion for all things furry, feathery, or slimy gave him a singular identity in a family where the boys, especially, had good looks and great teeth, played touch football, and expected to become president one day. “When we were kids, Bobby had this huge terrarium at Hickory Hill.” Says cousin Christopher Lawford. It was filled with Chinese water dragons, monitor lizards, snakes, everything. Bobby was lord of that jungle and he could spend hours with it. There was a lot going on internally for Bobby. Not that he didn’t like to be with people, but he had this ability to communicate with animals that the rest of us didn’t.”
As a young man, he was considered smart but had a rebellious, sullen, angry streak, particularly during the adolescent years that followed his father’s death. Even so, with the help of surrogate fathers, he finally navigated a series of elite boarding schools and then went on to graduate from his father’s alma maters, Harvard College and the University of Virginia law school. With his family’s money and prestige, Bobby traveled frequently with relatives and family friend Lem Billings – trips to Africa, rafting down the Amazon. But his life was directionless, hampered by a serious drug problem he shared with his closest sibling David. He was arrested for possession of heroin in 1983, and the next year David died from an overdose. It is a part of his life that he refuses to discuss in detail, and he becomes visibly shaken when the subject is raised.
“David was my best friend”. Kennedy answers simply. It was around the time of the arrest that Kennedy discovered the environmental movement, attaching himself to the NRDC and a predecessor to the Hudson Riverkeeper as part of the community service he was required to perform as a part of his drug sentence. And it is around this time that Kennedy also swore off liquor and drugs – a pledge friends say he upholds more than a decade later. “Let’s just say, I had a tumultuous adolescence that lasted until I was 29, and then I grew up very quickly,” he says with a small laugh and a shake of the head. Since 1984, he has served as a lawyer for the NRDC and for the Hudson River organization. Kennedy is also a professor at Pace, where he runs a clinic for would-be environmental lawyers.
The clinic has become a kind of ad hoc law firm that Kennedy uses effectively to pursue his own environmental work. For Riverkeeper alone, Kennedy and the clinic have filed more than 80 suits against corporate behemoths like General Electric, and municipal ones like the city of New York. The Riverkeeper’s Cronin says that Kennedy has successfully settled or litigated all of them.
In a way, Kennedy has transformed himself into a kind of de facto New York attorney general for the environment, enforcing laws that negligent of lazy prosecutors chose to ignore. “The people of New York own the Hudson River. But General Electric owns every fish in that river because of the PCB’s are in every fish. They have taken away something of economic value. It’s theft – General Electric is stealing those fish and that river from the people of New York,” he says, sounding more than a touch like a politician. “It is the biggest thing that I, or any of us, will ever own, and I see myself as an advocate of those owners.”
Kennedy is a lawyer with a master’s degree in environmental law, but much of his work is done outside a courtroom; saving the planet, he wryly tells you, is as much about changing hearts and minds as it is about enforcing laws. “Bobby is not a legal scholar; he’s a good, capable lawyer,” says John Adams, the executive director of NRDC. “What makes Bobby so unique is his real desire to understand all the technical aspects – not just the legal questions involved in environmentalism but the science and nature as well. I’m a lawyer too, but I’m not searching as he is.”
“What makes Bobby so unique is his real desire to understand all the technical aspects – not just the legal questions involved in environmentalism but the science and nature as well. I’m a lawyer too, but I’m not searching as he is.”
John Adams – NRDC
On one particular Wednesday night, saving the planet requires speaking to the Women’s bar association of Westchester. It’s snowing, and the roads are slick. Several of Kennedy’s students show up to listen to a speech that will be filled with minutiae about eminent domain, watershed, and zoning, and very little rhetoric. Kennedy arrives and asks if he can make his presentation before dinner since both his wife and baby are sick and his other children, who live with his ex-wife must be picked up because she is also ill. This is a sympathetic crowd that things it’s just great that he wants to get home to the wife and kids. Saving the planet turns out to have a lot in common with being a politician, although this time he gets to miss the rubber chicken. As he puts on his coat, a middle-aged woman approaches. “Would it be politically incorrect to ask for your autograph?” She wonders. Kennedy blushes, and then obliges.
Bobby Jr., is indeed still a Kennedy. And in the grand tradition, he has his family’s vaunted ability to make enemies. Take Robert Kirkpatrick. A small town politician and real estate appraiser by trade, Kirkpatrick says he voted for John Kennedy in 1960, but “in retrospect, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t’ have.” He mumbles something about Marilyn Monroe and Camelot shenanigans, but it’s clear that the crystallizing event for Kirkpatrick in his view of the family was his encounter with the late president’s nephew. Kirkpatrick blames young Bobby Kennedy for almost getting him indicted in the mid eighties in a case involving the dumping of toxic chemicals into a Hudson River tributary. Back then, Kirkpatrick was the Newburgh town supervisor, and Bobby, in his early thirties was cutting his teeth on ecological activism.
“Here was this Kennedy kid running all over town, sloshing around in the creek, talking to the press, using his fancy name,” Kirkpatrick recalls. “He was saying that the town had a sewer problem. Well, I knew that. I don’t think there is anyone more concerned about the environment than me. Then he sued us without even coming in and talking first to the board – took the town to court over the sewage problem.
Kennedy isn’t from around here, and neither were the people working with him. To have to bargain with people of that type made me sick.”
“He really hates my guts,” Kennedy says, smiling. In environmental history, this is known as the battle of Quassaic Creek, a little stream that meandered through Kirkpatrick’s town and in which vegetation and fish were being suffocated by the chemical alum. The creek, says Kennedy, was being slowly poised by waste, and while it may not have been Kirkpatrick’s fault directly – Kennedy insists he never singled him out publically, and Kirkpatrick admits he simply suspects Kennedy’s handiwork in his legal problems – the town agreed to pay for the cleanup of the creek (and Kirkpatrick’s name was cleared). Still, as a Kennedy, he was cut very little slack . “The town of Newburgh tried very hard to use his name against him,“ says the Riverkeeper’s Cronin, on whose behalf Kennedy filed the suit. “They were saying everything he did was politically motivated and that he planned to run for office. They painted him out to be a carpetbagger. But he never took the bait.”
Despite the hard shift to the right in last year’s elections, there are signs that Kennedys pragmatic environmental politics are in turn with current sensibilities. The ongoing congressional battle over developing national parklands in Alaska has uncovered a surprising wellspring of pro-environmental feeling amount the public, including Republicans and polls have shown strong support for Clinton’s newly toughened pro-environment stand. Closer to home, Congresswoman Kelly, who last year took over the Hudson Valley seat vacated after the retirement of Hamilton Fish Jr., found herself roundly vilified at home (by Kennedy, among others) after she sided against the environmental lobby on a series of votes this past spring, including the big battle over revisions to the 1972 Clean Water Act. Since June, according to the Sierra Club, she has taken the pro-environment side nine out of ten votes. So Kennedy, should he enter politics, will probably find a at least a respectful audience for his argument that the environment in central to virtually every other domestic policy issue. “We can’t have sensible economic policy without the foundation of a good environment policy,“ he says in one of those long answers to short questions that he is so fond of delivering. “If we want sound policy in housing or health care or civil rights or education, then we must have sound environmental policy, because environmental policy is simply about community planning, making sure we use resources judiciously.”
“We have a choice today. We can run the planet as if it were a business in liquidation. We can convert out natural resource into cash. We can have a few more years of pollution based prosperity. But what we’re doing is, we’re building up a deficit that we are loading on the backs of future generations who are going to bear the cleanup costs, and are going to have to pay these costs based on the income that they receive from a denuded environment.”
Robert F Kennedy Jr
End of speech, for the moment. The office telephone rings; it’s Andrew Coumo, his sister Kerry’s husband (and another political heir who’s deciding whether he wants to run for office in NY.) He asks to be excused for a few minutes. ”I talk to some family members every day.” He says when he gets off the phone. “I am closer to my cousins that most people are to their brothers or sisters.”
This is more than family values posturing. Chris Lawford moved to Westchester from the city to be newer cousin Bobby and his family. He now commutes in several times a week to appear in the soap opera All My Children. I want our children to be close the way we were when we were kids.“ Lawford says. “Bobby works hard at family. I try to get to all the weddings of the cousins; Bobby gets to all of them.”
But Kennedy’s own immediate family life experience a jolt three years ago when he and Emily, his wife of ten years, separated. “We had worked on the relationship for several years,” Kennedy says. “But it just could not be saved.” Kennedy admits that his strict Catholic upbringing made it difficult for him to seek a divorce, but he felt it was the best thing for his two children, 11 year old Bobby III and Kathleen, 7, better known as Kick (in memory of his late father’s sister Kathleen, who died in a long ago airplane crash. “I thought it was better for them to have a chance to see what a relationship between a husband and wife should be rather than what they were seeing between Emily and me,“ he says. “Now both of us are in healthy, nurturing relationships and Emily and I are still friendly.”
Kennedy lives with his new wife, Mary Richardson, their 14 month old son Conor, and 10 week old daughter, Kyra, in a modest farmhouse in Mount Kisco, only a few miles from the sprawling, eighteenth century Bedford home he and Emily shared and where Emily, a lawyer, still lives. The proximity allows them to share custody of Bobby III and Kick – Bobby takes them there days a week, including the weekend. Richardson is a striking brunette who passingly resembles Maria Shriver, but with far more delicate features. She works in NYC for the ancient regime interior design firm Parish Hadley as an architect.
“I had known her for years and already considered her a friend, “ Kennedy says of Richardson, a college roommate of Kerry’s at Brown. “Then one day when I had invited her to come to an area exhibit, the scales fell off my eyes. I suddenly saw her for the first time… If I could interview every woman on the planet, I couldn’t find a woman more in sync with me.”
And according to friends and family, being in sync with this Kennedy takes considerable energy and patience. “He’s very, very spontaneous. He’s a lightning rod,” says Lawford. “Last Christmas, we all kicked around the possibility of going to the Bahamas. Before I know it, he had arranged for us to stay at this German industrialist compound and he had invited along a dozen folks.”
For relaxation, Bobby continues a hobby that he began when he was 11, flying hawks. “They are very sociable birds,” he says. He’s in the kitchen making himself some lunch – a little pasta and some chocolate mild and cake. “The birds will ride in the backseat of my car, out of a cage. I don’t want to appear immodest, but they seem to enjoy my company.” Kennedy first became involved with falconry after reading The Sword in the Stone, a story of young King Arthur that has obvious historical resonance for him. (He also holds a license from the Department of Fish And Wildlife to band migrating birds.) “The falcons are essentially following their instincts,“ he says. “The sport is getting them comfortable enough with your presence to allow you to follow them and watch them as they hunt.”
Such a carnivorous pastime – certainly for the hawks – makes Kennedy a very nonconformist enviro, something others in the movement are not shy about pointing out. In 1992, for example, Kennedy found himself on the defensive when he tried to intervene in a case where Conoco sought the rights to develop oil deposits in the Ecuador rainforest. Scathing articles appeared in both the New Yorker and the Village Voice accusing Kennedy of selling out the interests of the Huaorani Indians who live in the region. “Bobby believed that the best hope for the rain forest was with Conoco, which had a relatively good conservation record,” says Buck Parker of the Sierra Club, which opposed the plan Kennedy and the NRDC originally supported. Kennedy wanted to create a fund for the Huaorani that would force Sonoco to pay several million dollars to the tribe to develop hospitals and schools and for environmental protection. “Critics said it was not what the Huaorani wanted,” says Parker, “and Bobby said to me that regretted moving too quickly at first.”
Kennedy says he has no regrets, and maintains that he had been invited by the Huaorani to negotiate for them. Nevertheless, the experience burned him, and he eventually withdrew, as did Sonoco. The rain forest is now being developed by the Ecuadoran National Oil Company and a Houston firm with scant effort at conservation, according to environmentalists. No money goes to the Huaorani, “Mother Teresa does not demand that we succeed, she demands that we try,” Kennedy explains. “I try not to invest in the results of the work; I try to focus on the fact that the work clearly ought to be done.”
“Mother Teresa does not demand that we succeed, she demands that we try”
– Mother Teresa
Cousin Chris Lawford suggests that this attitude of almost monkish commitment has deeper, more personal roots. “After we see him, my wife, Jeannie, always kids, ‘I love Bobby, but I wouldn’t want to be his wife,’ “ he says. ”With Bobby, you always have to keep moving, keep those demons away.” END
